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Monday, March 13, 2017

Cleveland's Screaming (now on video)

Review by Bob Ignizio

*NOTE* After numerous edits, and a release via the digital-only platform distrify in 2013, CLEVELAND'S SCREAMING!has finally been given a physical home video release on DVD. Some further tweaking has been done to the film proper by Cleveland hardcore scene veterans Tom Dark and Mary Ellen Tomazic, notably a spoken introduction to the film by Dark, but the film proper has not been changed much since the version we reviewed here in 2013. With that in mind, the review that follows is also more or less the same as the one I posted then.

The 2006 documentary AMERICAN
HARDCORE did a pretty good job
documenting the beginnings of hardcore punk in the early eighties.
But having cast a (nation)wide net and working within the expected
time constraints of a feature film, it was a given that not
everything one might have wanted to see in such a film could make the
final cut. For instance, pretty much the entirety of the
Akron/Cleveland hardcore scene.

Thankfully
for fans of the North Coast underground music scene, Brad Warner
(bass player for early 80s Akron hardcore band 0DFX and author of
several books including Hardcore
Zen) has righted that
wrong with a documentary of his own called CLEVELAND'S
SCREAMING! As is typical in
such films, Warner blends archival footage of the bands he's covering
in their heyday with modern interviews with the musicians. We get to
see early raw footage of bands like The Dark, 0DFX, The Offbeats, The
Pink Holes, Starvation Army, The Agitated, and more. Interview
subjects include not just the band members, but some of the fans, as
well.

CLEVELAND'S SCREAMING doesn't
take a straight chronological path in telling its story, opting
instead for an “oral history” format that allows its subjects to
share interesting stories and anecdotes without necessarily worrying
if everything flows exactly from point 'A' to point 'B'. The result
is a more relaxed, conversational film that gives a good sense of
what the scene was like without feeling like a dry history lesson.

One
of the most frequently recurring themes in the interviews is how
dangerous and out of the norm being part of this scene was at the
time. A kid sporting a mohawk today doesn't raise many eyebrows, but
in the early eighties a hairstyle like that could get your ass
kicked. And while punk rock (or a corporate facsimile thereof) can be
heard on mainstream radio stations today, back then the audience for
this kind of music pretty much consisted of the members of the other
bands, and maybe the “Munchkin” girls (don't ask, just watch the
movie).

Given
the vintage of much of the archival footage, some of it looks and
sounds a bit rough at the time. But remember, this was the early
eighties before everyone had a HD video camera in their phone. As for
the interviews and overall editing and assembly of the film, it's
simple but professional, with no cutesy graphics or animation. And
that's as it should be. This is a movie about punk rock at its most
raw and belligerent; it's not supposed to be pretty.

Other than Tom Dark's introduction, the big difference between the previous digital edition and this DVD is that there is a second disc of bonus material. There is an extended interview segment with several veterans of the scene that will delight the more scholarly music geeks, but the real attractions is the fair amount of live concert footage from various bands featured in the film. This material was shot for a public access music show based out of Michigan, and as mentioned above is a bit rough around the edges, but welcome nonetheless.